I transformed my interview questions into an online survey thanks to SurveyMonkey. I sent the interview off, with an additional question, to a bunch of people who were willing to take it.
In the past couple of weeks, I have updated and annotated my LIT review. I have also contacted the Boston Evangelical Church and sent them a survey that they will hopefully forward to their community. In turn, I will hopefully have a variety of responses. Of course, this didn't come about until later, so I acknowledge that I probably won't get many, if any, responses from this source unfortunately.
*This was meant to be posted over a week ago, but it's been sitting in "drafts." Sorry about the delay, my bad! After my conversation with Julie Chen, I have a) been pointed in the direction toward multiple organizations that could potentially help me, and b) emailed said organizations. As of today, only one has responded (AC DC) and they just need some clarification on what I want to get out of them, since some of their information is confidential.
This past Saturday, I finally got in touch with Harvard graduate student and Team HBV member/organizer Julie Chen. We talked on Skype for about 20 minutes, and now I have more organizations that I can get in touch with. These groups are situated in Chinatown and they are called ESL, a program led by Harvard graduate students who teach Chinese immigrants, Mandarin and Cantonese, how to speak English, and the Boston Chinese Evangelical Church, which has a lot of people in its congregation. I plan to get in contact with the people who are either leading these or are a part of these organizations.
Last night, I had two interviews. The first one was with a man who will remain anonymous. I asked a few basic questions, such as "when did you plan on coming to the U.S. and when did you come to the U.S.," "why did you come to the U.S.," and "do you think there's a difference between Chinese education and U.S. education." We still have yet to finish the entire interview, so I will call him another time this week to finish up. The second man I interviewed, who will also remain anonymous, finished the interview. He had a few interesting answers, unlocking other questions. I plan to schedule more interviews in the future, including one with a woman who works at Northeastern University and Julie Chen, a Harvard grad student, whom I can potentially receive more connections through.
This past week I have acknowledged that my research topic is in crisis mode. Why? Because I have a question in my head that I want to explore, but I just can't word it well. I find that my research often ends up finding a way into my question, making it really wordy. I sincerely apologize for the tardiness of my revised Big Three, Annotated Bib, and Rougly Draft. The reason why I am struggling right now is because I find it hard to produce a high-quality piece when the research is either unfinished or insufficient. As a result, producing several high-quality pieces is hard, especially as someone who is very conscious of the quality of her work.
Moving on, I have written a few questions for interviews I plan to conduct in the near future. I would like to sit down and talk with my interviewees, ask my few questions, and, depending on the answer, ask another question. I have been given an interesting contact at Harvard University who might have a lot of other people I might be able to talk to. We'll see how that goes! If this blog is posting, I finally found a stable wifi source.
I must sincerely apologize for my lack of updates. I've been traveling in London and Paris since last Tuesday and I had little to no access to the internet. When I had internet, it was too weak to handle Weebly (I tried to publish/update some artifacts, but the server crashed. I tried again and again, but it was no use-- I kept losing my additions. T'was a quite a sad time). I guess to sum things up, I've had a marvelous vacation full of theater, sightseeing, food, and art, but at the same time had bipolar wifi. Until I return home, I've typed my updates up in notes. I will review them when I get home to ensure that there aren't any key typos in them and try to get them up on Weebly. I'll be a while longer, but I really appreciate the patience. Update 1: As I travel back in time with a little bit of turbulence and jet lag, I, again, apologize for the lack of updates. I will resume updating over the next few days. Update 2: I am just posting this at home now that I have time. Time to hit the books! This pile will become significantly smaller when I identify the books that I really need.
*By the way, this was meant to be posted on February 10. I will go into further detail as to why my absence has been so extensive. Sorry about the huge delay. Due to yesterday's snow day, I spoke with my mentor today during homeroom. I told him a summarization of my new topic and he seemed to take it well. He just seemed a bit surprised when my topic was completely different from my original theme. He recommended that I listen to the podcast known as "Planet Money" of NPR, as they have covered segments on Chinese real estate (in China).
So… this post refers to the past few days (1/29-1/31). I told my supervisors about my topic change and they seemed pretty okay with that. However, one of them warned me that if I changed my topic, my feelings toward my project MUST go from "like" to "love." I genuinely feel a whole lot of love toward this project because I see a lot of interesting stories and perspectives coming from my resources. However, before I could really dive back in to my project, I had to submit another proposal. Right now, my "green light" is pending. I plan to contact one of the supervisors to see the status of this. Anyway, I am starting to gather a new list of artifacts, as I had to completely start my artifact search over. As of right now I have no artifacts, but I plan on reaching out to my mom's clients really soon (depends on their availability) and checking out a book from the library called Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan. Although leaving Crazy Rich Asians in a Greengineering (my awesome major) community computer's search bar made a lot of people freak out, I think I will find a lot of interesting back stories of Chinese families/couples and their motivation behind investing in the U.S. real estate market.
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